Post by KC on Jan 27, 2006 19:55:24 GMT -5
Officer Kevin J. Grob
Jan. 24, 2006 - A former St. Tammany Parish juvenile sex crimes detective was ordered to serve four years in prison for indecent behavior with 14-year-old twins, one of whom was a victim in a case he was investigating, a judge ruled Monday.
Kevin J. Grob, 50, pleaded guilty to the reduced indecent behavior charge on Nov. 15, more than a year after he was arrested and charged with molesting one of the girls. He met the twins and tried to befriend them while investigating a 25-year-old Covington man on charges of carnal knowledge of a juvenile.
While awaiting the sentence Monday, the girls' mother said Grob took one of her daughters to his house on Aug. 15, 2004, while she was at work with her other daughter. The girl told her mother that Grob touched her while they were alone in his car.
The mother notified authorities two days later, and police arranged a recorded telephone conversation to document Grob's treatment of the twins, said Rick Wood, spokesman for the district attorney's office. During the phone call, Grob used sexual language with both girls and agreed to pick them up behind a Covington area movie theater on Aug. 22, 2004.
Grob was arrested at the theater, booked with molestation and ordered to surrender his law enforcement credentials. Sheriff Jack Strain fired him the same day, according to his spokesman at the time.
Both girls testified in November that they would accept a judge sentencing Grob to probation if it meant they didn't have to participate in a trial.
"I'm scared of what's going to happen," one girl said when asked why she wasn't comfortable testifying at a trial. "I'm very nervous about it. I don't like talking in front of people."
But their mother asked the judge to send Grob to prison for at least two years. She said the twins' father molested them when they were 5 years old, and she accepted a guilty plea and a two-year sentence then to keep her children out of a courtroom.
"They said if I would have put my babies on the stand at 5 years old and they had to face their daddy, that my babies would have been crying for their daddy and we probably would have lost," the mother testified. "And he would have got away with what he did."
She said her daughters, now 15, were again scared to testify. She said that while she wanted Grob to serve prison time, she didn't want to see her twins be "put through the wringer over this worthless man."
Judge Peter Garcia of the 22nd Judicial District Court in Covington said Monday that while he took the girls' wishes into account, he couldn't hand down a probationary sentence given Grob's status as a detective who specialized in sex crimes against juveniles. The judge said that role ensured that Grob knew that what he was doing was illegal and that he used his position of power to inflict the abuse.
"I find it particularly egregious that these victims were victimized again by someone who was supposed to be protecting them," Garcia said.
He also ordered Grob to register as a sex offender upon his release.
Defense attorney Tom Thornhill said outside the hearing that Grob denied touching either girl and pleaded guilty only on the basis of the lewd conversation recorded by police. He said Grob was going through a traumatic divorce at the time, but has since demonstrated in a psychological evaluation that he has no propensity to sexually abuse children.
Thornhill said the girls' mother was most interested in the possibility of a payout from a federal lawsuit against Grob and the Sheriff's Office. The lawsuit was filed last fall.
Grob had worked for the sheriff's juvenile division since October 2001